Quotes

Although people do usually seem to think of feminists as being committed to particular ideologies and activities, rather than to a very general belief that society is unjust to women, what is also undoubtedly true is that feminism is regarded by nearly everyone as the movement which represents the interests of women. This idea is perhaps even more deeply entrenched than the other, but it is a very serious matter for feminism that it should be thought of in both these ways at once. This is because of what seems to be an ineradicable human tendency to take sides. While it would be ideal if everyone could just assess each controversial problem on its own merits as it arose, what actually happens is that people usually start by deciding whose side they are on, and from then onwards tend to see everything that is said or done in the light of that alliance. The effects of this on the struggle for sexual justice have been very serious. The conflation of the idea of feminism as a particular ideology with that of feminism as a concern with women’s problems means that people who do not like what they see of the ideology (perhaps because they are keen on family life, or can’t imagine a world without hierarchies, or just don’t like unfeminine women) may also tend to brush aside, explain away, sneer at or simply ignore all suggestions that women are seriously badly treated. Resistance to the feminist movement easily turns into a resistance to seeing that women have any problems at all.

Janet Radcliffe Richards, The Ssceptical Feminist: A Philosophical Enquiry, London, 1980, pp. 2-3

Morality in foreign policy isn’t about bombing bad guys. It’s about helping people. And usually, the best way to do that won’t involve bombings at all.

Vox, 2015

No one thinks that they make bad jokes, but everyone knows some people that do, so there’s an obvious disconnect. Some people consistently make bad jokes, and don’t realize it. You might be one of these.

Tynan, Superhuman by habit, 2014

As he searched the physics literature on the long-term future of the universe, Dyson noticed that the available papers on the subject shared a certain strange peculiarity. “The striking thing about these papers,” Dyson recalled afterward, “is that they are written in an apologetic or jocular style, as if the authors were begging us not to take them seriously.”

It was not a proper use of your time, apparently, to imagine what might or might not happen to the universe some billions of years down the road—a prejudice that was rather surprising in view of the fact that many physicists nonetheless lavished huge amounts of recycled paper, time, and attention on what had happened billions of years in the past.

Ed Regis, Great mambo chicken and the transhuman condition: Science slightly over the edge, Reading, 1990, p. 270

Anyone reading Sigmund Freud’s original works might well be seduced by the beauty of his prose, the elegance of his arguments and the acuity of his intuition. But those with a grounding in science will also be shocked by the abandon with which he elaborated his theories on the basis of essentially no empirical evidence.

Nature, Psychology: A reality check, Nature, vol. 461, no. 7266, 2009, pp. 847, p. 847

To justify a policy to which one is attached on self-interested or ideological grounds, one can shop around for a causal or statistical model just as one can shop around for a principle. Once it has been found, one can reverse the sequence and present the policy as the conclusion. This process can occur anywhere on the continuum between deception and self-deception (or wishful thinking), usually no doubt closer to the latter.

Jon Elster, Securities against misrule: Juries, assemblies, elections, Cambridge, 2013, p. 5

[U]n homme politique […] cherche d’abord à discerner son intérêt, et à voir quels sont les intérêts analogues qui pourraient se grouper autour du sien; il s’occupe ensuite à découvrir s’il n’existerait pas par hasard, dans le monde, une doctrine ou un principe qu’on pût placer convenablement à la tête de la nouvelle association, pour lui donner le droit de se produire et de circuler librement.

Alexis de Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique, Paris, 1835, p. 2

It is maintained that a question does not make sense unless the questioner knows what kind of answer he is looking for. However, while the fact that the questioner knows the “outline” of the answer may be a strong or even conclusive reason for supposing that the question is meaningful, the converse does not hold. One can think of examples in which a question is meaningful although the person asking it did not know what a possible answer would look like. Thus somebody might ask “What is the meaning of life?” without being able to tell us what kind of answer would be relevant and at a later time, after falling in love for the first time, he might exclaim that he now had the answer to his question.

Paul Edwards, The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1967

One of the key goals of feminism has been equity. That is, a man or a woman with the same set of aptitudes and motivations should have an equal chance of succeeding. We can endorse this without reservation. However, this does not mean that men and women on average actually have the same motivations, so we should not necessarily expect equal sex representation across all sectors of society. A second goal of feminism has been to celebrate and validate women’s values, which are often different from those of men. It is surely more important to value the pro-social orientation many women […] possess, than it is to lament that they are not more like men.

Daniel Nettle, Personality: What makes you the way you are, Oxford, 2007, pp. 181-182

Io credo, disse la Marchesa, riguardando alla facilità, con cui gli uomini si scordano di quegli oggetti, que presenti anno più degli altri nella mente, che anco nell’Amore si serbi questa proporzione de’ quadrati delle distanze de’ luoghi, o piuttosto de’ tempi. Così dopo otto giorni di assenza, l’Amore è divenuto sessanta quattro volte minor di quel che fosse nel primo giorno.

Francesco Algarotti, Il newtonianismo per le dame, ovvero dialoghi sopra la luce, i colori, e l’attrazione, Naples, 1739, pp. 244

Is it credible that my generation could be so special? Literally hundreds of generations have thought that they had the right moral values. Two thousand years ago, the Romans—the imperialistic, crucifying, slave-owning Romans—were congratulating themselves on being Bcivilized,^ because unlike the Bbarbarians^ they had abolished human sacrifice. This was genuine progress, but what they did not realize was that thousands of years’ additional progress remained to be made. We are in the same position: we know how much progress is embodied in our values, but not how much progress remains to be made in the future. This, then, is the Inductive Worry: most cultures have turned out to have major blind spots in their moral beliefs, and we are in much the same epistemic situation as they are, so we will probably also turn out to have major moral blind spots.

Evan G. Williams, The possibility of an ongoing moral catastrophe, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, vol. 18, no. 5, 2015, pp. 971–982, p. 974

[V]ague terms like “probably” and “likely” make it impossible to judge forecasts. When a forecaster says something could or might or may happening, she could or might or may be saying almost anything.

Dan Gardner, Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction, New York, 2015, pp. 181-182

Myself and I continue to converse while I put the vacuum away in the hall closet. “You really should clean this closet,” I say, wandering into the thicket of ball gowns and coats and suits as if I’m heading for Narnia. I pick my way over several suitcases and climb up a ladder and down the other side, having realized that it is important to find my bathing suit right now, but I trip on a broken television and land with a thud in a pile of boxes. “Oh, for God’s sake, don’t get me started,” I shout, and crawl back out, finding my hiking boots on the way. I go down the hall to collect all my shoes. “The thing is, probably everyone talks to themselves now and then, don’t they?” I sweep everything off the closet shelves and begin arranging my heels in order of color and height. “But perhaps they don’t talk to themselves quite this much. Time to do the laundry!” Abandoning the shoes, I pull all the bedclothes off the bed, upending cats, and go out my back door and down the staircase of my condo, singing a little laundry song, and I trail through the basement with my quantities of linens, note that my laundry song has taken on a vaguely Baroque sort of air, and note further that, to my regret, I do not play harpsichord, though my first husband’s mother did, but she was really fucking crazy, and once called me a shrew. “A shrew!” I cry. “Can you imagine! Who says shrew?” I laugh almost as hard as I did when she said it. I continue my efforts to stuff my very large, very heavy brocade bedspread into the relatively small washer. “Perhaps it won’t fit,” I murmur, concerned, but then realize that if I just leave the lid open, the washer will, in its eminent wisdom, suck in the bedspread in its chugging, “obviously,” I say, rolling my eyes at my own stupidity. I pour half a bottle of laundry soap over the bedspread and turn the washer on. I stuff the sheets and attendant cases, pillows, etc. in the other washer and wander back upstairs. “I’ve locked myself out,” I say grimly. “Fucking idiot.” I lean my forehead against the door and become curious as to whether I can achieve perfect balance by tilting myself just right, “On the tips of my toes, with the forehead just so, and she does it!” I cry, balancing there. “People, she does it again! Will she never cease to amaze!” I shake my head in wonder, and laugh riotously. “Probably time to stop talking,” I murmur. My neighbor comes out his back door with a bag of garbage. Real casually, I lean my cheek against the door and sort of right myself with a shove of my face. Hi! I wave dramatically, as if he is far away. He smiles nervously. I can’t decide if he smiles nervously because I am acting weird, or because he is getting his PhD in philosophy, which would make anyone nervous.

Marya Hornbacher, Madness: A Bipolar Life, New York, 2008, pp. 230-231

It was a common platitude—during the boom years of the 1980s—that Japan was the future and that America needed to follow and learn from Japan. The funny thing is, those claims might have been true, but in the opposite direction of how they were intended. Japan is an object lesson in how to live with a slow-growth economy.

Tyler Cowen, The great stagnation: How America ate all the low-hanging fruit of modern history, got sick, and will (eventually) feel better, 2011, p. 87

[A]ll living things fall into […] three great domains. The Domain Bacteria includes Cyanobacteria and most groups commonly called bacteria. The Domain Archaea (‘ancient ones’) comprises the Halobacteria (salt-digesters), Methanobacteria (methane-producers), Eocytes (heat-loving sulphur-metabolizing bacteria), and others. The Domain Eucarya includes an array of single-celled forms that are often lumped together as ‘algae’, as well as multicellular organisms. Perhaps the most startling observation is that, within Eucarya, the fungi are more closely related to the animals than to the plants, and this has been confirmed in several analyses. This poses a moral dilemma for vegetarians: should they eat mushrooms or not.

Michael J. Benton, The history of life: A very short Introduction, Oxford, 2008, pp. 35-36

The first circumstance which introduces evil, is that contrivance or economy of the animal creation, by which pains, as well as pleasures, are employed to excite all creatures to action, and make them vigilant in the great work of self-preservation. Now pleasure alone, in its various degrees, seems to human understanding sufficient for this purpose. All animals might be constantly in a state of enjoyment: but when urged by any of the necessities of nature, such as thirst, hunger, weariness; instead of pain, they might feel a diminution of pleasure, by which they might be prompted to seek that object which is necessary to their subsistence. Men pursue pleasure as eagerly as they avoid pain; at least they might have been so constituted. It seems, therefore, plainly possible to carry on the business of life without any pain. Why then is any animal ever rendered susceptible of such a sensation? If animals can be free from it an hour, they might enjoy a perpetual exemption from it; and it required as particular a contrivance of their organs to produce that feeling, as to endow them with sight, hearing, or any of the senses. Shall we conjecture, that such a contrivance was necessary, without any appearance of reason? and shall we build on that conjecture as on the most certain truth?

David Hume and J. M. Bell, Dialogues concerning natural religion, London ; New York, 1779

We already know enough to lead perfect lives. […] Our trouble is not ignorance, but inaction.

Dale Carnegie, How to stop worrying and start living, New York, 1984, p. xvii

The relationship between fitness and survival creates a deep asymmetry in nature.

It’s why, for women, it’s even more important to be sexually disgusted by ineffectiveness than to be sexually attracted to effectiveness. Effectiveness requires a lot—thousands of genes, hundreds of adaptations, dozens of organs, and millions of neurons working together in awesomely intricate ways to produce sustained, adaptive behavior. But there are an infinite number of ways to be ineffective as a male animal, from being spontaneously aborted as a blastocyst to losing competitions to rivals, and literally every point in between. […]

Thus, apart from cultivating signs of effectiveness, it can be even more important to stop showing signs of ineffectiveness. In most species, in fact, a lot of female choice is about avoiding the bad rather than approaching the good.

Geoffrey Miller, Mate: Become the Man Women Want, New York, 2015

Why would the amount you worry about disease be a significant predictor of the a mount you worry about social relationships? After all, you might have had a history of dependable and reliable relationships, but some unsettling brushes with disease. The answer must be that the menta mechanisms that underlie worrying about disease share brain circuitry with the mental mechanisms that underlie worrying about other things. Any variation in the responsiveness of those shared circuits will show up in all kinds of worrying, not just one kind. It’s a bit like a car. The handbrake and the footbrake do different jobs and have some separate components, but they also rely on the same hydraulic system. As a consequence, a loss of brake-fluid pressure will show up in reduced effectiveness in both brakes. The more two components draw on shared machinery, the greater the extent to which the performance of one will be a predictor of the performance of the other.

Daniel Nettle, Personality: What makes you the way you are, Oxford, 2007, pp. 50-51

The idea that a developing fetus is part of the woman’s body is so biologically ignorant that I would call it medieval, except that would be to insult the medievals! The fetus is not like an appendix or a gall bladder. From the moment of its conception and implantation in the wall of the mother’s uterus, the fetus is never a part of her body, but is a biologically distinct and complete living being which is, in effect, “hooked up” to the mother as a life-support system. To say a fetus is part of a woman’s body is like saying that a person on life support is part of the iron lung or the intravenous equipment. Having an abortion is not like having an appendectomy. It is killing a separate human being, and to try to justify that on the grounds that a woman can do what she wants with her own body is just politically correct ignorance.

William Lane Craig, Hard questions, real answers, Wheaton, Illinois, 2003, pp. 118-119